I saw the below laptop advertised on one of our local for sale sites for $600 which seems quite reasonable and I have emailed the seller for a look.
Never owned a laptop as yet so what do you think?
It looks good.
Make sure you get all of the original holographic CDs with the Windows 25 digit key as you may have problems with Microsoft verifying XP Pro's validity.
I had a laptop for several years and took it to Costa Rica when I worked there for 7 months in Nov. '99 through June '00. I could only get 33.3kbs dial-up but at least it worked until I forgot to unplug it at the first indication of a thunder storm but thankfully that was at the end of May.
I have it still but it is incredibly slow as it only has a 200MHZ MMX processor and 196MB RAM running winME.
I may not be much of help at all, but at that price comparing to other laptops available here it's way too cheap. With that specs, it would already be around US$2,272 here.
Just make sure there are no pirated nor broken stuff.